Earthsea: image source
Ursula K. Le Guin: "The Trilogy of Earthsea"
They came then into the
streets of one of the cities that are there, and Arren saw the houses
with windows that are never lit, and in certain doorways standing, with
quiet faces and empty hands, the dead.
The marketplaces were all empty. There was no buying and selling there, no
gaining and spending. Nothing was used; nothing was made. Ged and Arren
went through the narrow streets alone, though a few times they saw a
figure at the turning of another way, distant and hardly to be seen in
the gloom.
All
those whom they saw -not many, for the dead are many, but that land is
large- stood still, or moved slowly and with no purpose. None of them
bore wounds. They were
whole and healed. They were healed of pain and of life. Quiet were their faces, freed from anger
and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope.
Instead
of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, it
was not for himself, but for all people. For he saw the mother and
child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together;
but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold
it or ever look at it. And those who had died for love passed each other
in the streets.
In
the end, all literature, all science, all knowledge, are travel
reports. Sometimes reports from remote lands where one has actually
been, sometimes from lands of pure fantasy, sometimes from realms that
science can create although nobody could ever go there: the inside of
stars, remote galaxy, the great black holes.
And here is a story
of a travel of these strange days of Christmas of 2020. This travel meant walking
in a this foggy city, nearly empty of people, with the few Christmas lights
looking lonely and useless. And the people: all masked, all looking at each other suspiciously, all
walking on as if they had nowhere to go. It was a place that looked very
much like the description of the Land of the Dead that Ursula Le Guin
gave us in her "Wizard of Earthsea."
That real fog and that
real silence that enveloped the city were just the background of a
virtual travel to another foggy land: the land of truth that doesn't
seem to exist anymore. I started this trip by looking at the scientific
literature about the coronavirus pandemic. Reviewed scientific
papers are supposed to be the very source of truth. What I found were plenty of contradictions, of contrasting results, of evident bending of
the interpretations, of attempt to be politically correct to appease the all powerful watchers who take the
form of editors and reviewers.
There is a kind of fog that
pervades everything in the scientific literature. You are always under
the suspicion that it would take so little to corrupt scientists. And I
know it happens. I have seen it happening. Scientists turn out to be so cheap to corrupt, all what
it takes is the promise of a research grant, but let me not tell you a
few sad stories I know. In any case, this is what science is today, and
that is supposed to be "Science" starting with a capital letter and on
which you must believe. And if you don't, you are, what? A conspiracy
theorist? A science denier? An enemy of the people?
It is a fog that surrounds
everything in science. And even if you can trust the authors, when the data look good, the conclusions sound, you see that what we call science has no impact on the debate on the pandemic. Have you tried to argue in a public debate on the basis of data and rational arguments? You know what happens: you find
yourself pelted with links by people who use them as if they were stones
launched by medieval catapults. It is not just fog: you find yourself in a house of
mirrors, you see multiple reflections of everything staring at you from
all directions. And every reflection claims aloud "I am the truth! I am
the truth!"
Surfing the web, I stumbled into another case of mirrors reflecting into each other. Do you remember the Rwandan
massacre of 1994? You probably remember it as the story of how the evil Hutu (the
majority) massacred the poor Tutsi (a minority), as told in the emotional film "Hotel Rwanda." But I found myself facing a report
titled "Hotel Propaganda" that proposed the exactly opposite
interpretation. The ones massacred were the Hutu when Rwanda was invaded from Uganda by an army led by the Tutsi and
supported by the Western powers in order to gain control of the mineral
resources of central Africa.
Did Cain really kill Abel, or was it the opposite? How can we know? What
do we know about Rwanda? Could you pinpoint Rwanda on a world map? Have you ever met a Rwandan? Have you ever seen
anything of Rwanda that didn't appear in one of the Western propaganda
channels? What is truth, as Pilate said? Mirrors everywhere, the truth is everywhere and nowhere, and the fog
pervades everything.
Still roaming a strange and foggy land, I stumbled into something even stranger and foggier -- an article by Thorsten Pattberg on the Saker blog
-- (Yes, I know that it is one of the most subversive sites of the internet) It is
strange how I arrived there: I was writing something about
Caligula, the Roman Emperor. You know, the pervert, the madman, the one
who made a horse a consul and who forced people to worship him as a God.
Yes, we all know that, but is it true? And as I was asking myself that
question, I stumbled into Pattberg's post that mentioned exactly the
same subject: was Caligula a monster or a maligned hero?
The
fog of history is truly thick if we try to pierce it across the nearly 2
thousand years that separate us from Caligula. And yet, we think we
know something about Roman Emperors, don't we? But what do we know about Roman Emperors? How do we know that
such people even existed? How do we know that there existed such a thing
as the Roman Empire? Sure, you can find great walls and half-crumbled
buildings, but what are they for? Who built them? The Romans? The
Atlanteans? Aliens from Betelgeuse? Or who?
Pattberg's piece is a
nice trip into the land of nihilism. Who are we? What are we doing?
Where are we going? It contains such gems as
"Since something can exist without being existent (interest rates, gross
domestic product, French cuisine, the billion-year commitment and
unicorns), soon our planners will introduce the realm of non-existence –
and harvest it accordingly. It is a bit like discovering the concept of
negative numbers. The notion of humans who are actual burdensome
“minus-people” will capture imaginations. We will compute trillions of
them."
And so it goes. In these foggy days, in a city
populated by masked ghosts walking while suspiciously watching each other, the impression is
that nothing is real, except for the fact that maybe we do live in Le
Guin's Land of the Dead as she describes it in her Earthsea cycle. And
maybe Earthsea really exists somewhere, except that we, the dwellers of
the Land of the Dead, cannot see it.
It is more than just a similarity,
because the way Le Guin describes her fictional world, she seems to have
been prescient of what would have happened to the world we deem to be
real: the refusal of death leads to nothing but the loss of life. In the story, Ged
the Archmage says to the sorcerer Cob:
You exist:
without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot
see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save
yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is
yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to
draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your
nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not
all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.
And that's how a promise of immortality had become worthless in the fictional (or maybe real) world of Earthsea. And so it is for us, in our ghostly world of today
that we think is real. We sold everything we had, including our freedom and our dignity, for a
false promise of immortality.
But, as
the Japanese poets would say, the world is made out of dew, just
condensed fog. And as long as we can walk, we walk with our feet and we walk with our
minds. Someday, maybe we'll get somewhere. Or maybe not. But we keep
walking.
More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin
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